


the alcatraz coup

by arbitrarily



Category: Fargo (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, past Mr. Wrench (Fargo)/Mr. Numbers (Fargo), past Nikki Swango/Ray Stussy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-13 07:29:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11179953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: She needed a new partner. So did he.





	the alcatraz coup

**Author's Note:**

> Written after episode 3.09, so totally highly likely (or, basically a given), the finale this week will render this an AU.
> 
> Also, as a blanket warning, there are some descriptions of wounds and injuries canonically earned, as well as some amateur first aid, but nothing graphic.

 

Oh, I read somewhere that in twenty years, more or less  
This human experiment will reach its violent end  
But I look at you, as our second drinks arrive  
The piano player's playing "This Must Be the Place"  
And it's a miracle to be alive  
One more time —

there's nothing to fear.  
"IN TWENTY YEARS OR SO," FATHER JOHN MISTY

 

 

 

Drive. Bandages. Water. Food. Sleep. She turns the steering wheel and the chain from her lone handcuff clinks as it sways. Drive. Bandages. Water. Food. Sleep. 

Nikki likes making plans. She likes thinking at least three steps ahead. Know where you’re going and then figure out how to get there. Assume there will be rain and make a Plan B. At least three steps. Drive. Bandages. Water. Food. Sleep.

She glances over at her passenger. Still awake. He looks like total shit, but there’s an alertness to him, the wanness and the waxiness of his complexion aside. That's good. To be fair, she assumes she looks no better. He catches her looking and stares back at her. She nods once. Add that to the list, somewhere before _sleep_ : devise some sorta scheme for communication.

He taps his mouth. He points two fingers at his eyes, then towards her face. Breaking through the static on the radio, she can hear tiny tinny voices singing the chorus to that one Darlene Love Christmas song. 

“You read lips?” she says. He nods. “Well thank Christ for small mercies,” she mumbles, turning back to face the road. The sun’s up now, hidden by cloud cover, threat of snow. Drive. Bandages. Water. Food. Sleep. 

Would you look at that: it’s Christmas morning.

 

 

 

 

 

Handcuffed and led to the back of the prison bus, Nikki couldn’t get herself to a three step plan. She was stuck on the first; Step One: Stay Quiet. Tell them nothing.

As the bus pulled away, she had stared down at the ring still on her finger. Her arm bumped against her seat mate’s at every pothole the bus careened down into, her cheek scraping across his suede jacket after one particularly vicious jolt jostled her awake. Shit. Even if they were smart enough to figure she couldn’t have killed Ray, they’d probably still find a way to get her on probation-related cause. “You’re never going back there,” Ray had told her. Back. Before. Before the stamp and before the ring and before Maurice. Before she knew the taste of rock salt and asphalt. Before the money. “This is your new life. It’s ours. And it's starting now.” It was the single most romantic thing a man had ever said to her. A draft carried down from the windows that shuddered as they wove through the dark, empty night, made her shiver. She blinked fast. Maybe that was Step Two of her nonexistent plan: Don’t Cry. So she watched the metal ring in front of her, the chain threaded through it, tethering their cuffs together. It’d pull his way, then hers, his, hers, following the sway of the bus and the echoing sway of their bodies. His, hers. His, hers. Her eyes fluttered shut.

When they opened, she had her Step Three: Stay Alive.

 

 

 

 

 

They’re almost out of gas. 

She pulls the green bug into the first gas station she spots, stops at the tank. Money. The black cloud at the back of her thoughts, hovering over her plans like the worst sort of weather her entire life — money. She looks over at her … companion? That doesn’t seem like the right word for him. 

“Money?” she asks once he looks at her. He shakes his head. She shakes hers. They’re both still, the car cold now that Nikki’s turned the ignition off. He grabs her arm suddenly and points towards the convenience store attached to the gas station. 

“What … ” she starts to ask, and then she stops. She sees it: the mounted security camera. There’s no red light. She looks back over at him. He draws his hand across his throat— _dead_. He points to the tank, and then he points to the store. And then he gets out of the car. 

The automatic doors chime as they slide open. There’s a lone kid behind the register who doesn’t so much as blink as they enter, his head bobbing as he sleeps standing up.

They peruse the wares inside the store in shared silence. Nikki snatches a postcard off the circular rack —  _ MONTANA!_, a cartoon moose proudly proclaims. She frowns. She’s pretty sure they’re still in North Dakota. She also picks up an oversized novelty pen. She grabs him by the elbow and lets go just as quickly. She points at herself and then writes, _Nikki_ , on the back of the card. She smiles at him, all grim-faced, sweaty and exhausted. He nods. She points to him then with the pen, and after a beat he takes it from her. He pauses, sighs heavily, but he writes. 

_wrench_ , it reads beneath her own name. “Huh,” she says aloud. Whatever. She takes the pen back from him. From Wrench.

_Wanna rob this place?_ she writes. He nods again. She extends her hand and he takes it. His hand engulfs her own, his grip tight and implacable. They shake. He snags a few more postcards from the rack and shoves them into his coat pocket. She takes the pen. 

“Nice to meet you,” she says to the dancing suede fringe across his back as he approaches the register.

 

 

 

 

 

“No more robbery,” she tells him once they’ve put distance enough between them and the gas station. Granted, a brief stint of convenience store robbery probably wouldn’t even register on their respective rap sheets, but still. It’s the principle. Probably. “At least,” she adds, “of the innocents.” 

Beside her, he (Wrench, she reminds herself), starts to sign furiously. She has no idea what he's trying to say. She lets go of the wheel long enough to hold her hands up and shrug, a pantomime of her own confusion.

He takes to stolen pen and postcard and scribbles, in all capital letters, _THERE ARE NO INNOCENTS IN AMERICAN CAPITALISM_. 

“Well, you got me there.” Then she says, “Probably no more killing either.” 

He just looks at her blankly. 

“Unless necessary. Like, super necessary.” That gets his approval.

 

 

 

 

 

ERSTWHILE — 

Chief Dammick forgets about the crash as soon as it happens. Out of jurisdiction, out of mind. 

“The feds got that, yeah?”

“The U.S. Marshals,” Gloria says. For police, she’s never met one who cared so little for specificity. 

“That’s what I said.”

“So, that’s it then? We just let her go?”

Chief frowns. “Let who go?”

 

 

 

 

 

They stop at a motel in northern Montana for the night. He helps her into the bathroom, the both of them little more than dead men walking. It’s odd to her how synchronized they are despite having met, what? Less than twenty-four hours ago? They drove for hours after their convenience store robbery, stopping finally at a Wal-Mart not long after sunset. The fluorescent lighting did neither of them any favors. They bought supplies, first aid mainly, indiscriminate pre-packaged food, bottled water, a six-pack of socks, cheap clothes (Wrench had taken umbrage with what she had thrown into their cart — men’s thermal henley long-sleeved shirts, sweatshirts with cheap screen-prints of bears on one and wolves on the other, a pair of grey sweatpants for him and a pair of black ones for her with the word _CUTIE_ unfortunately written across the ass), a hunting knife, and a box of ammo. 

After they ripped off that gas station convenience store, they had checked the glove compartment. Their benefactor had left them some (though not much) cash, mainly ones, and a 9mm Beretta, loaded. Nikki could almost feel the sigh of relief that carried through Wrench as she watched him hold the gun in his hands. 

“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, well aware he couldn’t hear her and he couldn’t see her mouth.

But now, the motel room bathroom. He’s efficient. He points at the tub, so she sits down on the lip of it. Her whole body has gone stiff and uncooperative. It’s difficult now to even bend at the waist. He gets her boots off for her, Nikki hissing through her teeth as his hands cradle both firmly and gingerly her hurt leg. Her velour track pants have more or less stuck to the clotted, dried blood and she can’t watch as he pours warm water over the pants and the wound. She yelps, one hand reaching out and grabbing onto his shoulder. He glances up at her. Funny how his face is as solid and impassive, as gentle, as his hands on her. He nods once. She shakily returns it. Not for the first time, she thinks — he’s done this before. The first time she had thought that was when he dragged her into the woods away from the bus. The second time was when he ( _they_ ) decapitated that sorry son of a bitch. Jesus Christ, she decapitated somebody. The surreality of it all is licking at her heels, threatening to swallow her down whole. She sucks in a deep breath. She wants to tell herself she’s been through worse, but this is pretty bottom-barrel-scraping here.

Wrench gets her pants off her quickly, mechanically, and maneuvers her body so she has her hurt leg in the tub. It strikes her as both insane and ridiculous he still has that coat on; she gets this dumb idea in her head that maybe that’s all that’s holding him together. He takes that off and he’ll just go to literal pieces, limbs scattered. A manic laugh catches in her throat; they've made it this far and now she's cracking up. She’s still holding onto his shoulder and she tightens her grip. Like an anchor, she thinks dimly, breathing hard as she watches him pick up the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “Just do it just do it just do it,” she chants quietly. He’s watching her face and he nods again. And then he does it. 

He helps her up, after. He wraps his arm around her middle as she tests her weight on her legs, and she gasps in pain, folds in on herself even though that only hurts more. She almost misses the frown on his face, the look of confused concern, but then he’s moving, his hands lifting up her t-shirt and she’s shaking her head, but it's too late — he’s seen the damage. 

She glances down. The bruises somehow look worse, but isn’t that how healing works? It gets worse before it gets better. Her body looks like one of those fucking Rorschach tests, all dark blots you could read anything into it you wanted. She shakes her head when he finally looks up at her face. He signs something.

“I don’t … ” she trails off.

He tries it again; she still doesn’t know. He sighs, and she gets that. She hears that futility alright. Finally, he holds up one finger and he spells out the three-letter word he had signed. _I-C-E._

“Ice,” she repeats. He nods, and points at her torso, the hem of her t-shirt still lifted and held in his hand.

“Thank you.”

 

 

 

 

 

Nikki waits until she hears Wrench leave before she limps over to the bathroom door. It shuts with a click, and she flips the flimsy lock. 

She tries to clean up with the cheap motel soap at the sink, lacking both the strength and the energy to get in the shower. She sticks her head under the low water pressure of the faucet, the water neither warm nor cold, but still makes her shiver. That’s when she starts to cry. 

At first she tries to keep quiet, a threadbare towel pressed against her mouth to contain her howl, but then realizes — what does it matter. Either he’s not there, he’s getting ice, or he is there and he can’t hear her. So she cries and she cries until her chest aches as much as her leg does, as much as the bruises that have yellowed and purpled like rotted fruit, down her side and across her belly. Until she can almost believe that pain she feels is Ray. And so long as she feels that, he is still a part of her. 

When she steps out of the bathroom, wet-haired and red-eyed, Wrench has the ice bucket on the dresser. He’s struggling to get out of his jacket, fringe dancing furiously around him. 

“Alright, buddy, your turn.” 

She manages to get him out of his clothes (all limbs attached, mind you). She’s tired enough that she lets herself look at him. He’s big in that strong way men get when their strength is earned outside of a gym but rather through the labor that comes with the life they’ve chosen or been forced into leading. He’s marked up front and back by a bunch of old scars, the ones earned with her only adding to the collection. “Old hat, alright,” she mumbles to herself.

She’s done this before, too. You learn that you’ll suffer a lot and do a whole lot to yourself to avoid the law. She thinks they have that lesson in common.

When she’s done, he puts some ice in a towel and he gives it to her. She crawls into one of the beds, the bundle of ice clutched against her aching side. He sleeps, too. 

In the morning, she finds on the nightstand between them one of the postcards they stole. 

_we have to keep moving,_ he wrote. _i know a place._

 

 

 

 

 

First, they stop at a diner. 

“Yeah, hi there. I’m gonna have the eggs, and the bacon, and the sausage links. Home fries, too. And that comes with a biscuit, yeah?”

“Yes, ma’am. Or toast.”

“We’ll go with the biscuit. And go on and pour some of that gravy on top. Side of pancakes. Cup of coffee. And a hot fudge sundae, as many sprinkles as you got on top.”

She looks across the table to Wrench. “You?”

He raises his eyebrows, adding to the partially amused expression on his face. He shrugs, gestures towards her.

“He’ll have the same,” she tells the waitress.

“The sprinkles too?”

“But of course.”

 

 

 

 

 

ERSTWHILE,  in Eden Valley —

“Knock, knock,” Winnie says. Gloria smiles over her shoulder as Winnie steps into her office. “Got some real weather coming, they say. Just in time for the long weekend, too. And here I wanted to convince the husband to head out to Fargo, got a good President’s Day mattress sale going.”

“Hey, Winnie.”

Winnie stops at the edge of Gloria’s desk. She drops a clear Evidence baggie onto the desk. There’s a postcard inside it, a moose, _Montana_. She looks up at Winnie.

“Now, don’t ask me how I got my hands on it, or ask me — it’s a helluva tale. But I see this, and I see these names, and I get to thinking: those are Gloria’s guys.”

“'Wrench?'” Gloria reads aloud off the postcard. Still in the plastic baggie, she turns it over in her hands. The card is trampled and crunchy from the street salt laid down in the winter slush. 

“Yeah. That other fella missing from prison transport. All accounted for — ”

“Except for our Miss Swango and a Mr. Wrench,” Gloria finishes for her.

“Exactly. So I get thinking, ‘I gotta bring this to Gloria.’”

_Nikki_

_wrench_

_Wanna rob this place?_

“You think it’s a code?”

“I think they’re trying to communicate,” Gloria says. She had read the files she begged for behind Chief’s back out of Bemidji. “Our friend Wrench here is deaf.”

“You don’t say.”

 

 

 

 

 

They drive for hours. Nikki can feel her pulse in her leg, but she doesn't say anything. She drives.  She’s always hated the landscape this far north. Flat, empty. Desolate. The sort of place those long ago pioneers tromped through en route to certain death and possible cannibalism.  Wrench writes down directions as they go, until they find themselves up by the border to the Great White North and he tells her to follow an unpaved, snow-covered country road down into the woods. 

Funny. Not once does she bother to doubt him. If he was gonna kill her, she supposes, he’d have done it by now. 

They find a small cabin waiting for them. There’s a cellar built into the ground alongside it. Combination lock, high-tech considering their surroundings and the old-timey look to the cabin itself. She stands alongside him as he punches in a string of numbers, and the cellar unlocks. She peers down, a metal ladder leads deep into darkness. More of a bomb shelter than a cellar, she thinks. Wrench holds up a hand and then he descends. It's already after five o’clock and the sky's gone that dark blue gunmetal fading fast into a deeper black. Lights flicker below; she can't see him any longer, only the ladder and a waiting square of light. “Well, fuck it,” she says, and she follows him down. 

It's a bunker alright. No canned preserves or dried meat but instead what looks like some futuristic base camp for a civil war she didn’t know was coming. Rows of assault rifles, a safe built into the wall, and waterproof box after waterproof box labeled in permanent marker with dates ranging from the mid-1970s to 2006. She pries one open and she’s met with files. She picks one open; business holdings, dated 1981. She looks up and Wrench shakes his head. He points to the safe instead. He knows the combination for that, too. But when he opens it, they find it empty save for one envelope. In the envelope is a key — to the cabin above them, she assumes. She hopes. Her teeth are chattering; it's freezing down here. 

Wrench grunts and makes a furious-looking sign. She’s gonna assume that’s equivalent to her yelling, _fuck_. He turns to her; signs something she doesn’t follow. A long-suffering sigh from him, and then he’s drawing a dollar sign in the air, and then holding his hands up in the air comically dramatic, as if to say _where is it?_

“The money’s gone?” she asks, horrified. They have maybe eighty bucks left from the convenience store. He quirks an eyebrow, and slams the safe shut in disgust. 

“Hey, at least we’re outfitted for a future in bank-robbing. Or military coup,” she says to herself.

 

 

 

 

 

The cabin looks like it’s gone untouched for what’s gotta be the better part of a decade. 

Wrench has a strange look on his face when they step into the cabin. The only thing she can think to call it is _mournful_ , and she can’t decide what that means. She doesn't try to ask. Way she figures it, they all got their ghosts they’re gonna keep crashing into, he’s no different. 

The cabin’s only one room, like some nightmare barebones _Little House on the Prairie_ shit. There’s one of those god-awful black cast iron wood-burning stoves and a bed with about five quilts piled on top of it, the bed frame brass and in dire need of furniture polish. There’s a small kitchen table near the stove as well as a rocking chair. A bookshelf of old sci-fi paperbacks and even older _Life_ magazines. A tiny bathroom, but thank Christ it’s not an outhouse.

“Homey,” she says.

They found bolt cutters down below and are finally able to get those handcuffs off. Both their wrists are worn raw, but there’s some aloe in the biggest first aid kit Nikki’s ever seen. You could do amateur surgery with that shit. Her stomach turns a little when she thinks, _he probably has_. 

There’s a generator in the cellar that keeps the power going, but no heat other than the stove. Strikes her as one hell of a design flaw. They also found a doomsday prepper’s supply of food in that cellar — booze, too; they struggle with the ladder and their injuries, bringing up the bare minimum. They eat a silent dinner of canned stew and whiskey before, in equally silent agreement, they turn in for the night.

 

 

 

 

 

They share the bed for lack of anywhere else to sleep. And because it’s fucking cold, even with that stove going. Even with the five quilts that smell like her grandmother’s house, rest her soul. But getting into bed beside him, Nikki finds she’s met with the same question that’s been nagging her since they broke the chain and he stayed with her: what’s his angle? What’s he want her for? If she asks him though, maybe that’ll be enough to make him leave. Make him make her leave. Make him realize the absurdity of it all. 

She can hear the stove crackling. The wind gusting outside. It’s lonely and not lonely all at the same time. He’s here, beside her, but she can’t reach him. He’s a stranger. She used to love laying beside Ray in bed, both of them approaching sleep, and she’d tuck her body alongside his and she’d devise their future, one rambling plan at a time. And she’d be able to hear Ray’s smile in his voice without having to turn her head to see it. That was Ray though, wasn’t it? She always knew he was there; she never had to check. 

“We were gonna go to the Wildcat Regional. We really had a shot.” She says it into the dark of the cabin and beside her, Wrench doesn’t so much as stir.

All they had wanted was a little bit of money, what was owed. All she had wanted was to play bridge, and that’s really not that much to ask in this gigantic, enormous, tragic excuse for a world, but it must’ve been too much to ask to keep Ray too, to have him and love him, and where’s the fucking justice? She loved him and he loved her — isn’t that all anyone’s supposed to need? They only had wanted what was his. They only wanted what was theirs. She’s sorry. _I’m so sorry, Ray_. She has to make them pay. She has to. Otherwise — otherwise, what’s the point?

She rolls over. In the gloom of the dark and the flickering light from the stove she can see his eyes are still open, too. She hoists herself up onto an elbow and she taps him on the shoulder. His head snaps towards her. It’s dark, so she leans in close, her face taking up his entire field of vision.

“What are your thoughts on revenge?”

His mouth twitches into what almost looks like a smile.

 

 

 

 

 

Dawn breaks, cold as the night before. 

They sit together at the kitchen table beside the stove, and Nikki takes up the better part of an empty notebook found on the cabin’s bookshelf documenting what happened to her. Her handwriting goes looser and messier as she nears the conclusion of her tale — when she met him — and his own attention is split between watching her write and the paperback open in his lap. He watches her with more concentration, more confused scrutiny, than he directs at his book. She thinks that’s fair enough; she’s got her own share of confused scrutiny she could apply where he’s concerned. 

But she writes down everything. It’s positively damning, a manifesto of each and every misdeed that led her to here: her release from prison, meeting Ray, the plot to get the stamp from his brother, fucking Maurice and the fucking air conditioner, the beatdown in the parking lot, their aborted attempt to flee, Ray’s murder and her subsequent frame-up, and then, now, him.

She reaches the final page of the pad of paper and she writes:

_The moral of this tale, I suppose (if I was the sort of woman who goes around extracting morals from unfortunate circumstances) (I don’t think I am that kind of woman, but I suppose — yet again; there’s a great deal of supposition in the closing of this narrative, in addition to parenthetical tangents, and I think that’s what you might call a writerly flaw, but I find myself tired as all hell from the telling of it — you can make that determination of my character yourself), is two-fold: firstly, while I don’t deny my motivations were selfish in nature and the consequences of which were wide-sweeping and grave and deadly even, the things I wanted and the things I took were only ever what I thought I deserved and I was owed. Based on the suffering endured on the preceding pages, I can only reach the conclusion I am now owed even more and the taking will result in further bloodshed, of which I am also owed. Secondly, I loved Ray very much._

She stretches her hand, her fingers cramped from the death grip she had on her Montana novelty pen as she wrote. “Finished,” she says, and then she deposits her untitled recounting of her misadventures in his lap. 

He recounts his own brief tale on the back of her last page. His handwriting is worse than hers and all he writes is: _got shot got caught was going to prison_. That’s it. That’s his story. She frowns. 

_What’s your job?_ she scribbles. He blinks at it, then back up at her. She nods her head to the side, waves her hands as if to say, _before_. He takes up the pen and hesitates only briefly. 

He crudely draws a hangman. She stares at it — the stick figure, the noose, the X’s for eyes. Well, Christ. Her fellow traveler’s a goddamn —

“Hitman?” she says. He shrugs.

 

 

 

 

 

Time passes, as time is wont to do. They rest and they heal. Nikki lays out for him what she has taken to referring to as the Stussy Situation. She gets Wrench up to speed. And they scheme. Nikki loves a scheme. Truth be told, what’s got her in a great deal of trouble across the span of years that is her life is that she loves a plot and she loves a scheme. When they’re not fixated on a scheme for revenge, he teaches her sign language. They start with the alphabet.

He teaches her his first name. _W-E-S_.

“Wes?” she says out loud. She doesn’t know if she’ll be able to ever think of him as anything other than _Wrench_. 

“You don’t have to,” she says then, real sudden-like. “I mean, if you don’t want to. Help me. It’s kinda a lot. To ask of a person.”

Wrench (Wes?) just looks at her, and when she’s about to repeat herself, he picks up the pen. _Got nothing else going on_ , he writes. His face is more serious than his words.

“Okay then,” she says. And despite herself, she grins.

 

 

 

 

 

Here is what he does not tell her: it’s easy to get lost when you’re alone. He’s spent four years learning that lesson, and that’s a lesson a man learns only the hard way. There’s a lot of things you gotta do the hard way, or he’s done the hard way, including time. He doesn’t tell her because it would take too many words and he doesn’t have the patience or even the ability to take his history and everything he has lost and put it down on paper, crush it and rearrange it into words. Not like her. He doesn't tell her he's glad she can, that he's missed a mouth like hers, like Grady’s, how there are different sorts of quiet and some you can live with and others that try to kill you. The last time he was in this cabin was with him, a quiet insistent reminder to be found in the books he read, the empty notebook he left, their bodies under the same quilts he shares with her now. He doesn’t tell her how you forget it when you have it, when it’s in your grasp and you’ve known it for long enough to go ahead and do something as stupid as take it for granted, because he thinks she already knows that. They hid out here for over a month, over a decade ago, the two of them younger but not that young, when two people felt like enough to have the rest of the world at their mercy. Like maybe the world started and stopped outside that door, trembling in the winter wind. He doesn't tell her you get used to the pain, you get used to missing someone, because that's a lie. Four years, and he still hasn’t learned how to live with it. There’s no language worth learning to explain that. You either know it or you don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

Winnie perches on the side of Gloria’s desk. Gloria is typing, pecking at the keys, the letters slow-going. _S-W-A-N-G-O._ Winnie is patient. She talks over the slow motion clacking of Gloria’s keyboard. _W-R-E-N-C-H_. She's still not pregnant. 

“It’s getting downright Sisyphean, I tell you. Just gonna keep rolling that boulder up that hill, and every third week of the month, gonna roll back down on top of me and I’m gonna have to bust out the Tampax.”

Gloria merely grunts. She has both Miss Nikki Swango and Mr. Wes Wrench’s records up on her screen. Miss Swango’s pretty in that way most girls who know trouble are: it’s in the eyes, an implicit dare. Mr. Wrench looks like he could break her in half, no sweat. Doesn’t know if she means herself or Miss Swango or if it matters.

“Says here our fella Wrench’s been a fugitive of the law going on four years now.”

“Would’ya look at that.”

Gloria quietly studies their faces. They give her nothing more.

“You think they knew each other? From before?”

Winnie crosses her arms over her chest, her parka rustling. “You mean like in another lifetime or some such?”

“Sure,” Gloria says, her eyes still fixed on the pair of them. She clears her throat, sits back in her desk chair. “Though I primarily meant before the bus.”

 

 

 

 

 

They leave the cabin in late January. As they head out, he tells her, _First we’re going to see my lawyer._

“You have a lawyer?”

They had swapped out the bug for a Caddie at a repo lot en route to Minnesota; _friend of mine_ , he signed at Nikki. The utter terror on the guy’s face as he quickly slammed the trailer office door shut in their wake told a different story. _It’s been awhile,_  Wrench said.

They drive until they hit Fargo city limits. She glances down at the instructions he had written out before they left. She’s looking for the law firm of Feldheimer, Pfarrer & Associates. A big old high-rise, all glass and steel with a lobby that makes you feel important just by entering it. They ride in silence in the elevator up to the twelfth floor.

Nikki leans against the front desk and grins, her mouth painted in the dark lipstick she picked up somewhere between Montana and here. She tells the receptionist, “Yeah, hi, we’re looking for a Max Gold?” The receptionist doesn’t react. “Tell him a Mr. Wrench’s just stopping by.” She had memorized what Wrench had written for her. “Wanted to touch base, y’know, about an old pal. Sam Hess? Tell him that.”

“Right,” the receptionist — Tawny, according to the nameplate — says, unconvinced. She picks up the phone anyhow, talks quietly into it. Wrench watches her mouth the whole time. He offers Nikki a small nod. More mumbling, and then a nervous smile from Tawny as she looks up at them. 

“So, if you follow me.” She’s still nervous as she gets up, swipes her ID badge and opens the door to a generic hall of closed office doors. “Your fella there's not real talkative, is he, huh?” she says to Nikki. She's wringing her hands. There’s no way this guy is actually Wrench’s attorney.

“I like me the strong, silent type. A cowboy fetish, really. A whole John Wayne thing,” she says. 

“Oh, sure,” Tawny says. She exhales a big sigh of relief when they get to a door marked MAX GOLD, PARTNER. She raps her knuckles quickly on the door. “They’re here!” she shouts. 

His attorney, or not-his attorney, Max Gold, looks horrified to see him. As horrified as the repo lot guy. She’s noticing that seems to be a pattern with him. “You must be a real son of a bitch,” she murmurs under her breath, not without a note of admiration.

A mean grin crests across Wrench’s face and he signs something — faster than he usually does with her, but she must be getting good, because she can keep up. For the most part. 

“What’s he saying?” this Max Gold asks her. Panic’s not a good look for him.

“He’s saying, ‘you’re alive!’ I’m thinking that comes as a bit of a surprise to him.”

Stony-faced and fidgety, he gestures at the two chairs in front of his desk after a beat. “Sit. Sit, sit, sit.”

There’s a good long pause where all Wrench does is stare at Max Gold. So she waits them out. Finally, Wrench starts to sign. 

“He says you got something of his he wants. Now.”

It’s a key. Max Gold calls Tawny back in; asks her to escort Mr. Wrench to get what is his. Nikki is to stay in his office. “Which one of us you think’s collateral here, huh?” she asks him.

He ignores her. Instead he waits for the door to shut, like he was waiting for Wrench to leave to get real with her, because that's exactly what he does. 

“Listen, sweetheart. I know we just met, but you got any idea who you’re with?” he finally says.

“Mister, so long as he’s no goddamn Bluebeard mounting ladies’ heads on his wall, I don’t much care.”

She doesn’t like the look this Max Gold fixes her with — like he’s found her wanting. “Where were you in 2006?”

She frowns. “Chicago. Unbeknownst to me, about to get sent up federal for some malfeasances committed in my name.”

“You were framed?”

“No. I said they were committed in my name.”

“Well, while you were at your business, that fella there was up to his eyeballs in some real syndicate mess.”

Figures. “So he’s mob, yeah?” _Just like you_ , she doesn’t say.

“Yeah. Sure. Though he’s missed out on quite a bit of interdepartmental upheaval, laying low from the law. Regime change, they call it. Which I’m gonna go ahead and say makes your man there redundant. Without a role to fill, in the greater apparatus. Assuming anyone other than me even remembers him. Though — deaf hitman, kinda memorable, I should say.”

“He didn’t come here looking for a job,” she says, petulant as ever. “Why’re you telling me this?”

“Because I have always been of the opinion one needs informed consent before diving headlong into any sort of partnership. What you got with him is a wildcard.”

She smiles, her lips pressed together tight. “We’re good. But thanks.”

“What’s the plan? After furious retribution is delivered, of course.” Her surprise must show in her face, because he chuckles to himself. “You got the look to you. Had an ex like you once. Vengeful, I called her. Called her that for certain when she not only keyed my car but slashed the tires. Had that same look you got going on right now.” Nikki doesn’t say anything. Max Gold braces his arms against his desk as he leans in towards her. “I’ve always found that most revenge schemes lack an exit strategy.”

“I’d suspect,” she says, slow, “that’s on account of a lack of the luxury of imagination as to what a life lived without wrongs needing righted feels like. I’ll get my due, and then I’ll go from there.”

She stands. “He had a partner, you know,” he says, but he seems to be saying it more to himself than to her. “Those two boys, came up under Mr. Tripoli, they said.”

He says the name like it should mean something not just to her but to anybody; it doesn’t. But a picture is clarifying in her head now. _He had a partner_. Of course he did. “I don’t know much of anything about a Mr. Tripoli, but I do know: my friend there? He’s owed, too. His pound of fucking flesh. And we’re gonna go and collect on that.”

Nikki lingers in the doorway. For a partner, his office is just plain sad. One small narrow window, the sort you imagine a prison cell having when you’ve never actually been to prison. It’s narrow, gives a sense the walls are closing in on you. She knows he’s not Wrench’s attorney and she knows he’s no partner here. She’s so tired of it, men like him with a system that works exclusively in their favor. Ensuring they’re always gonna get away with it. 

“You validate for parking?”

 

 

 

 

 

They get a hotel room in Sauk Rapids, just outside of St. Cloud. A Ramada Inn. All businessmen as patrons, rotating in and out every three days. The key Wrench got from Max Gold belongs to a storage unit in Sioux Falls. Cash isn’t missing from the safe kept there. They take the money. It’s like a criminal-on-the-run survivalist set-up in there. Plenty of gear, tech and armament-wise. Fake IDs with a younger glowering Wrench gazing up from a Canadian passport, an expired Iowa driver’s license, a state ID card from Delaware. There are more IDs, the man photographed on them dark haired and bearded and Wrench only glances at them once before putting them back inside the safe.

 

 

 

 

 

Wrench continues to teach her rudimentary sign language. She’s a fast learner. Part of being a fast learner is being observant, and Nikki is observant as hell. You have to be, to know where your next con is coming from. You have to be aware of each card in play.

She steals a book from the Sauk Rapids Public Library. _The Handy-Dandy Guide to American Sign Language_. 

She flips through it that evening in their shared hotel room.

_I run fast._

_He is walking slowly._

_He has been battling against oppression._

_That is why I told you not to drive today._

_I would like a big glass of milk, please._

_My daughter is a teacher. My son is in prison._

_Her husband is dead._

_My three siblings are all quite solemn._

_When the publisher of the magazine retires, his son will take over._

_A prowler broke into the business last night._

_Are you sick? Is it serious?_

_Don't trust him. He’s lying._

_Thank you for dinner._

_I won’t bite you._

_I cheated on you and I am no longer in love with you._

“Well, that’s abrupt.”

 

 

 

 

 

“Well, I’d say,” Gloria says. She hits the  SHUT DOWN button on her computer menu; it restarts instead. “I’d say, it’s quitting time.”

“Got that right. And you know what I’d say?” Winnie says. “The both of us are owed a glass of something good.”

 

 

 

 

 

Nikki frequents the Sauk Rapids Public Library, even despite the notice they have posted on the community bulletin board about a book thief on the loose. In theory, the library has the internet and they have a bank of computers, but all their old newspapers are still on microfiche. 

She researches Emmit Stussy and Stussy Lots Ltd. She uses the computer to try to find public business filings. She’s not entirely sure what it is she’s looking for, but she thinks the word for it is, _irregularities._ She remembers Sy’s face when those two fellas showed up in the lot. She remembers the one’s accent. These aren’t the sorts you do business with when you’ve got nothing to hide. 

When she takes to the microfiche, she finds plenty about golden boy Emmit Stussy. Only makes her think of Ray. She stares unseeing at a profile for the _St. Cloud Times_ naming him Man of the Year 2009.

With disgust, she sits back in her chair. She remembers that conversation with Max Gold though. She bites her bottom lip and then she leans forward.

She scrolls back to 2006. Sure enough, headline after headline out of Bemidji. Murder after murder. 

_Of the two assailants, both of Fargo, Grady Numbers expired at the scene while Wes Wrench is in stable condition and police custody_. She frowns, squints. The grainy photo of Grady Numbers is the same man as the man on the IDs back in the Sioux Falls storage unit. She scrolls forward in time, skimming. Nothing about a trial. Nothing about who did the killing, other than the two of them. She almost misses it, and quickly, she scrolls back.

_Officer killed as shootout suspect escapes custody_.

“Son of a bitch,” she says with pride.

She scrolls further back, but there’s nothing pre-2006 she can find about him. About him or his partner. Not that she’s digging that far, not on purpose. She just sits there, idly scrolling. She pauses at the headline,  _MASSACRE!_. A motel shoot-out, 1979, Sioux Falls. There’s a brief column in one of the back pages that catches her eye about a rumored UFO sighting that same night. Nikki sighs, shuts the machine off.

It’s his story; he can tell it when and how he wants.

 

 

 

 

 

A couple nights later in a bar offering a happy hour special on well whiskey and scrawny chicken wings, Wrench tells her his story. Or, he tells at least the fraction of it he’s willing to give her. 

He tells her, via sign language, _I had a partner._ It’s apropos of nothing — they hadn’t even been talking. He had been sitting there, slouched low in his seat, staring off into the middle distance or at the bartender, trying to convince him via telepathy he needs another drink. She had been sitting there, puzzling over the flyer attached to the back of the scant bar menu advertising a Billy Joel Piano Man contest.

She lifts her gaze and meets his. She repeats it back to him, trying to show she understands. “You had a partner.”

He nods. He starts to sign again, a little too fast for her to keep the pace, but she thinks she gets the gist. Mainly, because she cheated. She read ahead.

“He was killed?” _Like Ray_ , she doesn’t say.

He nods. _Who?_ she signs. She knows how to do that much now.

There is a pause before he replies, and when he does, she has no idea what he’s trying to say. She shakes her head. “I don’t … know what that means.”

He snatches the cocktail napkin out from under her beer and picks up the pen on the table between them, left by the waitress along with the check. _THE DEVIL_ , he writes in overlarge handwriting. She’s come to know that handwriting as well as she might know another man’s voice.

She looks back up at his face, unsure what she’s looking for and unsure what her own reaction is.

What she wants to tell him she doesn’t have the words for. Or, she has the words but not the delivery. Or maybe she doesn’t have much of anything these days except for him. She wants to tell him that she understands, that if she’s learned anything in this last terrible month it’s that there’s a real evil at work in this world and it’s enough to make you feel powerless to stop it. But she’s gonna try, and she thinks he’s gonna try too. And that’s something. That’s everything. That means they’re not alone.

Instead, she says, “You snore, you know.”

About ten different emotions flash across his face before he settles on a hybrid of incredulous and amused. Incredulously amused, then.

_Is it annoying?_ he signs.

“Very,” she says. “Real loud.” Her mouth cuts into a wide, toothy grin. 

Instead, in the parking lot when they leave, she’ll hug him.

Expressions of intimacy are so different with someone who can’t hear her. Her voice has been everything to Nikki. It’s how she makes her case, crafts her own tale, her side of the story. She’s persuasive-like, when you combine her loquaciousness (a ten dollar word if she’s ever heard one) with her face and her body. Men fall down for girls like her, and she’s taken that for granted for a good long while. Those fellas who want her dead really punched a hole in that methodology, as did that uninterested police back in St. Cloud, and now, him. Wrench.

But in the parking lot, her new boots will sink in the graying slush, the night bitter cold and unforgiving for it. She’ll say, “Hey,” even though his back will be to her. So she’ll grab him by the arm, and he’ll let her. And then she’ll wrap her arms around him. 

She will tuck her head against his neck. There will be a moment of stillness before he responds, a careful hand at the nape of her neck as he pulls her closer to him, the other arm first draped and then wrapped around her back. The warmth of him will be familiar but new, something that she has felt indirectly and peripherally since she’s known him, now bodily against and around her. She will take a deep breath. So will he.

In the bar, condensation from both of their beers leaks across the table and the letters on the napkin bleed.

 

 

 

 

 

Gloria and Winnie are alone at the bar, already making good headway on their second drinks, the threat of weather still just that: a threat. Gloria has lost the thread of conversation, so she is going to tell a story. 

“Here’s a story,” she says, “ — ‘bout a man, and he goes and he gets himself lost in the woods. Doesn’t much matter who he was or where he was going. He got lost. All he had were the trees. Let’s say he had some snow, too. All he had were the elements and night was coming on fast, and that only made him feel more lost. Like he had gone and found a way to fall straight off the planet and he had landed in a world that looked a lot like ours, like the very world he had left behind, but it wasn’t. This place was colder. Emptier. In is wandering, he found an axe. It was waiting there, blade gleaming, bit down into a dead tree stump. Like someone had left it there for him. It was full dark now, and bitter cold, and he could hear the wolves and the wind, so he picked up the axe. He found the largest tree and he chopped himself a hole in the side, just wide and just tall enough to fit him. He climbed on through. This being not our world but another, the tree closed itself around him. He was still lost and it was still dark, but now he was warm. Now, he thought, I’m not alone.”

Winnie frowns. “How’s he gonna go and get himself outta that tree?”

“Well,” Gloria says. She gives her glass of bourbon a shake. ”He’s still got that axe, I suppose.”

 

 

 

 

 

Blackmail is an all-encompassing task.

They spend their days staking out the Stussy Lots Ltd. crew. Each day, they see the same man: bland, unexceptional; “That’s gotta be him,” she tells Wrench. They stake out the office and they stake out one of the lots, and it’s the same thing each time: this guy and his henchman.

_You said it was Ray’s brother’s business_ , Wrench signs at her. Or she thinks that's what he’s saying. She’s better at less complex sentences, though better still at interpreting him than signing herself. 

She nods. 

_Who is he?_ he signs, gesturing towards the man in the beige trench coat meandering his way towards a waiting big rig. 

They keep a running log of these men and their daily activities. They make them predictable. They keep a separate page for their accumulating questions. _What's in the truck?_ is at the top of the page. Nothing ever goes in and nothing comes out except for the men themselves.

She shrugs. They watch him in silence. She taps Wrench on the shoulder and turns to face him. “That's what we're gonna find out. He’s the guy. He’s our guy.”

Nikki recognizes the henchman, even if she doesn’t have a name: short, Asian, earbuds. Same guy who tried to kick her ribcage in, along with that other fella who had followed them into the woods but never came out. She points at him and then down towards her abdomen and mocks punching herself. “That's him.”

Wrench’s eyes lift up to her face and then shift out towards the guy. He’s compact, brisk; she knows firsthand he's ruthless. She catches the clench of Wrench’s jaw as he watches him disappear around the back of the truck. She knows he’s ruthless, too.

 

 

 

 

 

Back in their hotel room that night she sits cross-legged on her bed, cracking pistachios and eating only every third nut. There’s an old western on the TV she’s never seen before, muted, closed captioning flashing. She’s talking, more to herself than to him, about next year’s Wildcat Regional. “It’ll take some doing, but we can be ready for it, and — ” 

Wrench claps his hands together suddenly, interrupting her. He starts signing, quickly and aggressively towards her, his face not so much mean but exasperated and fed-up.

“You know I don’t know what you’re saying,” she says, over-enunciating and overly loud. He holds his hands up. He signs a little slower but still just as forcefully, each gesture a contained act of violence. Despite what she said, she got the gist of what he was saying the first time around, but it’s clear now: _how do you think this is going to work?_

“You’re a smart fella,” she says. leaning her weight back onto her hands. He’s perched on the edge of his bed across from her. “And I’m a good teacher.” She sits up straight again. “Wait, do you not like cards?” He shakes his head and starts signing again. She knows that’s not what he meant, but being deliberately obtuse is one way to drive the conversation and the agenda in her direction. Or at least that always worked with Ray. Goddamnit. Fucking Ray, she thinks, not unkindly. 

_What do you think happens next?”_

“You mean,” she pauses and cocks her head, “after?” He nods. He know what _after_ means. He knew she had vengeance as the sole engine allowing her heart to keep beating maybe even before she did. 

“We get our lives back,” she says. “And we play some competitive bridge.”

She watches his face soften. She doesn’t know why and she doesn’t question it. Later, she will allow herself to think maybe it was because she said, _we._

 

 

 

 

 

Three steps:

1\. Blackmail this fella of Emmit’s, probably learn his name first, and extract a sizable payment;

2\. Destroy these men's lives, just, fucking decimate them;

3\. Play bridge.

 

 

 

 

 

A couple nights later, she parks the car in the Ramada Inn lot. V.M. Varga. They have a name. She doesn’t get it, why that of all things — a name, not even a good name at that — has her feeling so — what? Angry? It humanizes him, she thinks. She remembers Wrench in that bar, _THE DEVIL_ he wrote on that cocktail napkin, because that’s what you want to believe, isn’t it? Only something that hideously unreal could take what you love. Sometimes she gets so angry she can taste it. It tastes a lot like bile and gunmetal. 

She says it out loud — “I’m so fucking angry, I can fucking taste it” —sitting there in the car beside him. She repeats herself, her head ducked, the words inconsequential, her hair hiding her face. And then, she feels it, Wrench’s fingers under her chin, lifting her head to face him. 

“Oh,” she says. “Sorry.” She brushes her hair out of her face. She forgets sometimes. His hand is still cupping her face. She wonders if her own face has become as familiar and known to him as his is to her. She has him memorized. “It’s nothing.”

But he doesn’t move his hand. He doesn’t move his hand, so she wraps her fingers loosely round his wrist. That sort of causality has been the primary momentum that has shaped her life. That brought her here. He did this, so I did that. She doesn’t want to be reactive anymore. She’s tired of it. She’s tired of all of it (she’s so fucking angry she can fucking taste it).

It's easier to kiss him than to try to explain herself. Explain any of that. She leans forward and she presses her lips against his, slightly off-center. Wrench doesn't react. 

Nikki pulls back. “Sorry,” she says again, but then he’s kissing her. 

Their kiss starts tentative but all too quickly drops down into the realm of the filthy, lightning fast. God, she’s like a teenager all over again — an ill-advised makeout in the front seat of a car, the windows fogging up, all hands and messy desperation, sloppy mouths, limbs knocking into each other. Careless, but meaning every touch of her body against his.

Kissing Wrench is different from kissing Ray in so many ways, she feels guilty for even thinking it. But it’s true — the differences so vast, she can’t even catalog them properly. For one, there was never this wild desperation driving her with Ray. With Ray, it was always like coming home, a safe and a warm place, a person who loved her. This is — there are no words. Which, she supposes, is why she kissed him in the first place. 

Everything about him is thick, she thinks — his bottom lip caught between her lips, his tongue in her mouth, the body she can barely wrap her own around. His thighs (her nails bite into his jeans, the flesh beneath, as she grabs at him), the thick reach of his hands on her, dragging from hip to the curve of her ass and then up her side. The sounds he makes against and into her mouth: wanting and thick. She whimpers into his as she extrapolates further. She kinda thinks she’d maybe fuck him right here and right now, except he’s pulling back from her, his hand untangling from her hair, out of breath, same as her. She can't stop thinking about what he could do to her.

_Sorry_ , he signs. The grin his mouth twists into is as filthy as it had been against her own.

 

 

 

 

 

He’s a noisy fuck.

The second she kissed him she knew she was going to fuck him. She thinks that’s called self-awareness. It takes a week before it happens, and when it does, when she finally has him inside her, her teeth knocking against his as if desperately trying to kiss him and tell him something at the same time, she’ll think, _we could’ve been communicating like this the entire time_ , and smother a laugh against his throat. 

They have an arsenal laid out on her bed — models of guns she doesn’t know the names to, hunting knives, a roll of duct tape — so they share his. 

She knows it’s going to happen before she does it. That’s called having a plan. She presses her body alongside of his, she breathes him in deep. She holds onto him the way you’re supposed to cling to the things that matter. Her cellmate, back when she was in the joint, had got in real deep with that mindfulness, yoga bullshit. She’d listen to the same tapes over and over again, and they must have permeated a part of Nikki’s brain she has yet to excise or replace with new memories, because she finds herself thinking it now. She can hear that same gentle yet threatening voice telling her to rid herself of everything in her life that doesn’t matter. What you have left though, you have to hold tight. Don’t let it go. Let those things know you won’t them go.

He's a noisy fuck, no awareness to how loud he is. He likes when she is though, a hand cupping her throat to test the vibration of the sound she creates because of what he does to her. 

There is a lot to hold onto and take note of here. The loud, almost relieved groan from him when she sinks down onto him. Her own answering moan, her thighs trembling over top of his. His wordless noises that bleed into each other as she starts to move, her fingers digging into the bulk of his shoulders. His marked-up, scarred body pressed against hers, his hand pulling at her hair, lengthening her neck, his mouth dragging from her mouth to her throat as she rides him. There’s too much. 

After, Nikki tells him to stay. She writes it with the tip of her finger, the edge of her deep purple painted nail, against his bare chest. _S-T-A-Y_. She writes it slow and obvious, and when she’s done, he is still until he isn’t.

He nods, as decisive as her own writing. He signs one word. She knows it — _together_. 

 

 

 

 

 

_We’re probably going to die. It’s serious._

_Everybody dies._

_Do you believe in a higher power?_

_I’m not very good at bowling._

 

 

 

 

 

“Maybe it’s all meant to be, y’know?” Winnie says. “I can’t get a baby to take in this here oven, and I meet you. If I could’ve, if it all worked the way I spent so much time wishing and hoping, and in bed with the husband, mind you, I’m not in that stall in the ladies’. And you’re not at that sink.”

“Or it’s chance. Probability.” Gloria’s glass is empty. She hates playing devil’s advocate, but here she is — playing it.

“Sure. But where’s the comfort in that?” She leans in towards Gloria. “This Wrench fella spends four years above and below the law, not getting caught the once, and the one time he does, who’s he get handcuffed to? Our Miss Swango. She gets framed for the murder of her Stussy and that’s what gets her a seat on that bus. Her trip to prison the first go-‘round’s what got her with Stussy in the first place.”

“Or it’s accidental. A real roadmap of tragedy you just laid out there.”

“Yeah, sure. But it’s nice, isn’t it? How somehow you never wind up traveling it alone.” Gloria finds she can't argue with that, so she doesn't.

“Is it wrong,” Winnie asks, three Moscow Mules deep, “if I’m hoping those two get away?”

"Eh," Gloria says. “Right or wrong might not be the question worth asking.”

“What is then?”

“Will they.”

 

 

 

 

 

This is what the future looks like:

They buy a house.

It’s a farmhouse, old, unlived-in. “When was the last time somebody lived here?” Nikki asks the realtor.

“Oh, I’d say probably 1979 or so. Fun fact, y’know, only one family’s ever lived here. They built it, they lived in it, and then,” she shrugs. “Yes, ma’am. No one’s lived here since the Gerhardts. 1979.” She tells them it's a real fixer-upper, but it’d be worth it. “Give you and your fella something to do, I’d say.” 

This is the future: they sit down together at the kitchen table, the window open over the sink even though it’s overly warm. Even though it’s nearly fall. It’s a beautiful afternoon. What they’ve got here is of the upmost seriousness, or at least that was what she told him when she made him take a seat. 

Nikki shuffles the deck fast and with enough flare to be impressive but not distracting. He watches her carefully. 

“First thing’s first,” she says. “Bridge is, without question, the greatest card game of them all. And, the most challenging.” She stops shuffling and places the deck facedown on the table.

She holds up one finger and inclines her head towards him. _To start_ , she signs. She has been practicing; his own fingers fit overlarge around her own when she’s wrong and he teaches her the right. _You need a partner_.

 

 

 

 

 

They were in the small cabin up north. He had her history in his hands. 

After a skeptical pause, Wrench wrote beneath the hangman on the back of the last page of Nikki’s account of preceding events, _this all true?_

Nikki had nodded. She took the pen from him.

_This is a true story_ , she wrote. And then she burned the pages. 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: all those various phrases listed from her stolen sign language book are from an actual guide I found online. Useful phrases! Fun fact, part two: [the Alcatraz coup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatraz_coup) is an illegal move in bridge that has a big penalty if discovered by the other players. And fun fact the third: Father John Misty's ["In Twenty Years or So"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkJUX4vIyuE) is a really good song. 
> 
> AND, you can find me over on [tumblr](http://widespindriftgaze.tumblr.com/).


End file.
